Sunday, February 24, 2008

Our Yard

The soft fluffy snow has melted leaving behind a shelf of slushy ice and a lot of soggy muck. the kind of muck that swallows garden tools. and slurps at your wellies. But the crocuses and hyacinths are already showing their heads. The mule deer in our back yard are LOVING them.

Right now i'm daydreaming about drier days of full bloom in the garden and how we'll soon be able to get back out there!

These pix are from our first summer at the cottage.

First thing we did was lay out the square foot gardening plots with cement blocks that were going to be thrown away.and put in the trellisesand made six foot tall tomato cages with space for compost in the middle to give off heat and extend the growing season.We tried the three sisters growing method. Corn provides a framework for the beans and squash to grow on.See how the zucchini i'm holding grew into an O? It stands for O'lover.O'lover studied a lot about plant guilds. Before then I hadn't realized the secret soap opera life of picky plants. There is high drama in gardening! Family feuds/ alliances the whole sordid shabang. We try to focus on peace and companionship in the garden and not grow cabbage or broccoli next to the strawberries.It's fun to look at these early pix and think about how two summers later the plants were much more established. Another difference is we started using well rotted straw as mulch. last summer we converted much of our lawn (about three times as much space) into garden areas. But this year we also have a daily-more-enormous dog to contend with. And remember how we named him "farmer" because he likes to dig? Yikes.

GrittyPretty is about two artists raising a baby boy, sewing, renovating an old cottage, urban farming, painting, spinning wool, knitting, environmental activism, and whatever feels...like magic. Join us as traditional skills are learned and practiced in the ultimate work of art: home.